The City of Tucson chose to show leadership and initiative in the effort to revitalize the Miracle Mile Corridor by choosing to site the Westside Police Service Center in a partially vacant former K-Mart. One of the goals of the City and the Police Department was to provide an open and friendly image to the community to support and enhance their community based policing policy that was already in place. A primary design challenges was to transform the facade of the building from the typical strip mall aesthetic into that of a significant civic facility. WSM Architects was able to accomplish this by only adding roughly 3,000 SF to the facility, and using that additional area for the public functions of the building (a public lobby, a public meeting room that can be divided into two smaller rooms, and a police training room). The remainder of the substation (60,000 SF) is contained within the shell of the old K-Mart. The new entrance canopy, public spaces and primary facade of the exterior had a higher level of finish to present a strong and permanent image to the community, to create an appropriate public image for the building that moves it from a big box retail image to one of a public building. The remaining three facades were simply painted and repaired to give the building a unified appearance and to complete the transformation of the entire facility. As a police station, structural upgrades were required to meet the seismic needs of an essential facility. The rest of the facility was constructed using typical gypsum board wall construction rather than masonry to accommodate future changes more easily, adding protective wall panels in the high use corridors to reduce long term maintenance costs.